Book Review

Hokusai: A Graphic Biography

Hokusai: A Graphic Biography

More years ago than I care to reflect upon, I was recommended a graphic novel called Logicomix which examined the developments and debates in mathematics and logic that dominated the early twentieth century through the lens of the life of famous philosopher Bertrand Russell. Logicomix narrative was multi-layered, intermixing the story of the writing of the book itself with the life of Russell and his contemporaries, and even tying in ancient Greek tragedy in a rather unexpected way. It really convinced me that graphic novels could not only be entertaining but also highly informative and great pieces of scholarship in their own right. Logicomix does a better job explaining Gödel’s contribution to logic than many books I’ve read.

My past experience with Logicomix meant that I was intrigued when I was given a copy of Hokusai: A Graphic Biography by Giuseppe Latanza and Francesco Matteuzzi for my birthday. I’m a big fan of Hokusai’s work – seeing some of his original prints on my trip to Japan in 2019 was a highlight even if we were unable to make time to visit the Hokusai Museum in Tokyo. I also had an idea that his life was a bit…eccentric to put it mildly, so this promised to be an interesting read. It also brought to mind the anime film Miss Hokusai which adapted vignettes from a manga about the life and artistic career of Hokusai’s most famous daughter, Katsushika Ōi. Unlike Miss Hokusai, Hokusai: A Graphic Biography is a western production intended for a European and North American audience rather than a Japanese one. This is made very clear by the choice to intersperse the story of Hokusai and his life with pages of text explaining Edo era Japan for the uninitiated.

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John Talbot and the War in France by A.J. Pollard

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John Talbot and the War in France by A.J. Pollard

There is a dearth of scholarship in English covering the end of the Hundred Years War. If you want to know what happened in France after the Treaty of Arras in 1435, you’re going to have a hard time. That was partly why I was so excited to get my hands on A.J. Pollard’s book about John Talbot. Talbot was a legendary English military figure; the bulk of whose career was career was spent in France between the years 1435 and 1450 – with a brief but disastrous return in 1452-3. Talbot is probably most widely known to medieval history enthusiasts for his dramatic death at Castillon in 1453, the final battle of the war where French commander Jean Bureau’s artillery obliterated the English charge – often seen as a turning point in European warfare. John Talbot was more than just the man who died in an arguably reckless charge in southwest France and A.J. Pollard’s account of his extensive military career both fleshes out the man and fills in a large historiographical gap in our understanding of the Hundred Years War.

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King Arthur: The Making of a Legend by Nicholas J. Higham (Yale University Press, 2018).

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King Arthur: The Making of a Legend by Nicholas J. Higham (Yale University Press, 2018).

We can often feel a strong desire for mythical and legendary figures to be based on some kind of historical reality – while we know that obviously not every aspect of the story can be true it would be so much nicer if a good story was at least be worthy of the dubious“Based on a True Story” tag used for so many Hollywood movies. In his book King Arthur: The Making of a Legend, Nicholas Higham systematically tears apart the myth of the historical Arthur piece by piece. It is impressive in its thoroughness and remarkably readable despite its complexity. This is not a book that sets out to convince academics, who are largely already on the same page as Higham, but rather one for general Dark Ages enthusiasts. As Higham notes, while it is all well and good for the idea of the historic Arthur to be largely ignored within academia, it still holds significant sway in popular imagination and histories and so he took it upon himself to show why there can be no historic Arthur. Higham is making good on the notion that instead of secluding themselves from the myths of public imagination, historians must be out in the trenches fighting them.

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The Battle of Poitiers 1356 by David Green (Tempus Publishing, 2002)

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The Battle of Poitiers 1356 by David Green (Tempus Publishing, 2002)

While hardly unknown or obscure, I’ve generally been of the opinion that the Battle of Poitiers is unfairly overshadowed by Crécy and Agincourt. While Crécy is noteworthy for being the great early English victory that reinvigorated a too expensive war, Poitiers and its aftermath really set the foundation for what would come next in the Hundred Years War. Still, there are far fewer books dedicated to Poitiers than to either Crécy or Agincourt, which is why I was interested to see that David Green had written one. David Green wrote what is probably my favourite general history of the Hundred Years War but before that he was best known as a scholar of Edward, the Black Prince, which makes it only logical that he would have written a short history of the prince’s most famous victory. The Battle of Poitiers 1356 is an excellent overview of the battle and its most famous participant, fitting quite a lot of information into a relatively short book.

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The Hundred Years War by Christopher Allmand (Cambridge University Press, 1988)

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The Hundred Years War by Christopher Allmand (Cambridge University Press, 1988)

Christopher Allmand’s history of the Hundred Years War is the classic college textbook on the subject. The book is (very slightly) older than me and a venerable institution in the study of this somewhat misnamed conflict. I have to confess that up until now I had never actually read it. You see, I came to the Hundred Years War by a slightly weird route. Since my background was in studying weaponry, I didn’t read many grand sweeping political histories of the conflicts where crossbows were used, instead I jumped straight into the nitty gritty of the detail. This is something I have decided to rectify and Christopher Allmand seemed like the best place to start.

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The Agincourt Campaign of 1415: The Retinues of the Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester by Michael P. Warner (Boydell, 2021).

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The Agincourt Campaign of 1415: The Retinues of the Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester by Michael P. Warner (Boydell, 2021).

The research on the prosopography of English armies during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is easily one of the most fascinating and rewarding bodies of historical research of the last twenty years. Pioneered by scholars like Andrew Ayton, Adrian Bell, and Anne Curry, this work has now been taken up by many more researchers and expanded beyond what the three of them could have managed on their own. Michael P. Warner’s book examines the Agincourt campaign through the lens of the retinues of King Henry V’s younger brothers. This is very much a work of academic scholarship that is in conversation with a wider pool of research, not an introductory book. That said, it is also remarkably approachable for a book of this kind and while an awareness of the work of Ayton, Bell, and Curry will assist anyone who wishes to read it, having actually read everything that came before is not a requirement.

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Murder During the Hundred Years' War: The Curious Case of Sir William Cantilupe by Dr. Melissa Julian-Jones (Pen and Sword, 2020)

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Murder During the Hundred Years' War: The Curious Case of Sir William Cantilupe by Dr. Melissa Julian-Jones (Pen and Sword, 2020)

At first glance, the murder of William Cantilupe by what appears to be his entire household in 1375 feels like something straight out of Agatha Christie. His body was discovered by the side of a road, but upon initial inspection the coroner determined that he had been positioned there so as to appear as if he was murdered by highwaymen – his clothes were undamaged despite him having been stabbed multiple times in the torso. An initial visit to his nearby residence found it entirely empty – his wife and staff all having relocated very soon after his last reported sighting. Suspicions and accusations abound, and eventually two servants would be executed for the crime and several others declared outlaws for failing to turn up to court. His wife was eventually acquitted of the murder – history, however, has been less kind to her. The dominant narrative of William Cantilupe’s death has long been a salacious story of an adulteress wife having an affair with the local sheriff using her position of security to off her husband and marry her lover. Dr. Melissa Julian-Jones book discusses the Christie-esque aspects of the story, but also picks apart that traditional narrative to explore alternative explanations, and in the process reveals a fascinating story of elite and common society in late fourteenth-century England.

When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History by Matthew Restall (HarperCollins, 2018)

When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History by Matthew Restall (HarperCollins, 2018)

I only very recently began improving my knowledge of the history of Spanish colonisation of the Caribbean and Mexico and must confess to still being quite the novice on the subject. My interest was spurred by intermittent brief references to the use of crossbows by Spanish conquistadors. I was intrigued and wanted to learn more, but I also knew that I couldn’t just dip a toe into the subject. The colonisation of Central and South America is a heavy subject and includes some of the worst genocides in human history. Even if what I was interested in was some niche facts about an old weapon, I couldn’t completely ignore that side of the history.

Matthew Restall has published many books on the Spanish in sixteenth-century America. I had previously read his Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, which is a great introduction to the subject of Spanish colonialism, and I would recommend it to anyone. That was a large part of why I was inclined to pick up When Montezuma Met Cortés, that and a Google Books search indicated that he at least mentioned crossbows a few times so I could be killing two birds with one stone.

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Edmund: In Search of England’s Lost King by Francis Young (I. B. Tauris, 2018).

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Edmund: In Search of England’s Lost King by Francis Young (I. B. Tauris, 2018).

The story of St. Edmund, who was King of East Anglia from around 855 until his death in 869, is a challenging one to tell. We don’t know if he was married or had any children, although later popular belief maintained that he was a virgin throughout his life – a sign of his holiness. We don’t know anything about his parents, although we do know he was a member of the Wuffing dynasty – probably its last. Basically, you could fit the entirety of our knowledge about the life of St. Edmund into a few sentences – given that fact what is this book about and why is it interesting?

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Peacemaking in the Middle Ages: Principles and Practice by Jenny Benham (Manchester University Press, 2010)

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Peacemaking in the Middle Ages: Principles and Practice by Jenny Benham (Manchester University Press, 2010)

Peacemaking in the Middle Ages is a truly phenomenal book, the kind of book that excites me as a historian and fills me with energy for my next project. The title would suggest that this is a very niche book without a wide appeal, but I think that anyone with an interest in medieval history should buy a copy and read it – it’s barely over two hundred pages and the paperback edition retails for a fairly reasonable £25 so you really don’t have an excuse!

Bear with me here, but the structure of this book is an impressive thing to behold. Jenny Benham’s writing is direct and purposeful, it never says more than it has to, and each point is well structured and supported without being didactic or boring. It is a master class in efficient and engaging writing throughout. I wish I could write a book this well. Benham is wading through some fairly dense material and writing about subjects that it would be trivial to make boring, but she avoids getting lost in the weeds and delivers her book in just the length it needs to be. It’s phenomenal.

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Blood Royal: Dynastic Politics in Medieval Europe by Robert Bartlett (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

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Blood Royal: Dynastic Politics in Medieval Europe by Robert Bartlett (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

I was fortunate enough to be in the audience for two of the lectures where Robert Bartlett presented some of the initial drafts of the work that would become Blood Royal. In particular, his discussion of the use of regnal numbering in medieval Europe, from its origins in the papacy to its later adoption by various monarchies, was one of the most interesting talks I’ve ever attended. I’d been looking forward to this book ever since it was implied at the final talk that one would be forthcoming, and while I had to wait quite a while the final product did not disappoint.

Review: Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson (MIT Press, 2021)

Review: Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson (MIT Press, 2021)

I was a huge fan of Jon Peterson’s earlier book Playing at the World (Unreason Press, 2012) when I read it back in either 2014 or 2015 – I was finishing my PhD and records from that time are hazy at best. I managed to sneak it into my thesis, so I must have read it before August 2015. I also really enjoyed Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana (Ten Speed Press, 2018), which Peterson contributed to. Given this pedigree of past works, I was very excited when I discovered that he was revisiting the subject of the early history of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in his new book, and I’m happy to report that it did not disappoint.